How To – Concepts of Websphere

In the enterprise Java application world, Websphere is the most used application server. IBM has created WebSphere as its product for a long time now. Other alternatives have been JBoss and Tomcat. (Though tomcat is not a full-fledged application server and there is a debate about it.)

In this post, we will discuss the basic concepts of IBM Websphere Application Server. If you have any questions, please post them in the comment and I will try to answer them to the best of my abilities.

Application Server

The primary component of IBM WebSphere is an application server. The server runs the actual code of your application. Each server runs its own Java Virtual Machine (JVM). All configurations can have one or more application servers. In other words, an application server can run on only one node, but one node can support many application servers.

Node

It is a logical group of application server processes that share common configuration repositories. A single node is related to a single profile. Likewise, one machine can have more than one node. A node can contain zero or more application servers.  An XML file stores the configuration information that Node is useful for.

Cell

A cell is a grouping of nodes into a single administrative domain. A cell can consist of multiple nodes, all administered from a deployment manager server.

Node Agent

A node agent is created on Node when a node is federated. The node agent works with the deployment manager for administrative activities.

Deployment Manager

Above all, with the deployment manager, you can administer multiple nodes from one centralized manager. This deployment manager works with node agent on each node. Therefore, application server nodes must be federated with the deployment manager before they can be managed by the deployment manager.

In conclusion, we discussed the basic concepts of the IBM WebSphere application server. Hence, subscribe to my blog here.